MARINE SNIPER in Vietnam Behind Enemy Lines: Ordered to Take Out High Value Targets | Sherman Hickam

mission where this guy shows up on a soapbox in the afternoon around three o'clock or whatever and he gets up on his little soapbox preaching his communist nonsense to the townspeople and our job was to

take

his ass. We went out and didn't set up on the hill, you know, early in the morning, before the sun came up, and we took a fire team to protect our rear and he and I took turns using the binoculars because after a while we already It was really powerful. Binoculars are great to see, but after a while your eyeballs are ready to fall out, you have to

take

a break, so as the day goes on, you know, we keep adjusting our guns for the wind and you know, the light from the sun and all those things affect the impact of the bullet, so we would do it all day until this guy would come out and whoever was on the rifle at the time would shoot and, you know, it would be on. the ground before the sound reached there, you are about to embark on the great crusade to confront this growing aggression and make no mistake, good will will prevail.

I was born in San Diego, California, and I have spent about half my life between there and Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a difficult childhood. I spent my time between the ages of 13 and 17 in an orphanage with the Busey family. You know, it's not good. I was living in the orphanage in New Mexico and several guys who were older than me had gone into the service, came back and visited and so on and um, a couple of them had gone to the Marine Corps and they told me, of course, not to go. to the Marine Corps to go to the Air Force or something and obviously you know me because you know a lot. head like I am I said now I want to go in the toughest, baddest suit they have, you know, I want to be a really badass

marine

, so I got my permit about two days before classes started for my senior year.

I got my mother's signature and uh. joined the Marine Corps came out of boot camp went into a unit that had just come back from the Cuban missile crisis and of course they wouldn't and I didn't know at the time I couldn't talk about it but I would ask them questions and all that stuff where did you guys go and what did you do and all that and um, it wouldn't be like that, I wouldn't say it, so anyway, that was my start in the Corps and the Marine Division and it was not long after that, we went into a uh, it's called, it used to be a float phase where you're in the Far East and sailing, you know, going to various ports and we did that until it was about a Well, I was overseas for a tour 13 months, but three months of that was just a float phase.

I came back to the States, in Pendleton for a year and then we had just gone to cold weather training in Valley, you know? snow shoes and learning to ski and combat and snow and I just came back from that I was sorting through our gear, parkas and all that and they came to Berks and said anyone who has more than a year to do it or more than A year to do it , uh, it's going to Vietnam and no one knew what Vietnam was back then, it was like you knew, so 65, I guess it was early 65.

Well, when we went, we spent about a month in Okinawa and I. Call it weatherization, you know, learning jungle warfare and all those things that you're really going to need in Vietnam and they asked you who wanted to be a

sniper

, you know, to begin with, you had to be qualified, an expert rifleman and stupid enough. Dude, you know, it's like it's a pretty dangerous job in general, but you know, I was young and enthusiastic and I thought, man, I want to do that, you know, so I went to

sniper

school and it was the first one they instituted since Korea.

I think they made a Marine Corps that eliminated it and they thought we didn't need snipers anymore, we got bombs and you know and all that, but it turns out they did need snipers and And uh, I ended up going through the first class at least there on Okinawa and I think which the first one they've had since World War II, even here in the United States they had already started sniper schools, so I went through it anyway and um. I became a sniper and was still attached to the team I was with, but during that month we also went to Raider training, i.e. learning to repel cliffs or climb cliffs, blow up a radar installation, row back with a rubber boat back to the sub

marine

, you know, and all that kind of stuff, you know, it wasn't about bonding classes and over and over again, all kinds of training that you could basically do anything, survive anywhere, that was the idea , so uh Not long after that, we often storm the beach in July and, well, those PT boats, you know, where the front falls and everyone runs away, you know, under the beer of gunshots and you know you overcome, you know what are you. pretty safe and we took some positions in July and we established an enclave that is half a circle from the beach to the beach and in that you know we had our headquarters and that was all a battalion sized operation, so I was assigned to the battalion In those days, I was a scout sniper and what we did was go out on reconnaissance missions and we would find out where the

enemy

is and not attack them because it's a reconnaissance mission that you're not armed for, that's not what you're there for, you don't like it, you're trying to snoop and poop and hide and you know how to camouflage and all that, you know, you just know you don't want anyone. to know that you're out there and then you're watching and looking, you see where their positions are and you're marking them, you have a little pen and paper in those days we didn't have computers or anything like that so we wrote it all down on paper and did our little mission and we'd go back to base and try to get back through the

lines

without getting wasted, you know, we had passwords and all that crap. you know, going back through the

lines

and you had to know where to go because we had loot adopting landmines and you know, bounces and all that, you know, calm cable or not Calm, but Constantine cable around it and you know.

It was quite well protected and getting inside that line would have been extremely difficult because it was also covered with, they call it, interlocking and overlapping bands of grazing fire, in other words, everyone has an area that they are responsible for when they are in position. and they fire that line, they cover that area if it's under attack and the guy next to them does the same thing, so it creates this overlapping fire along the line and it also interlocks, so anyone anywhere at About 100 meters away and there is nothing. probably not even a mosquito, you know, so that's what the team before us had done, they had fired their fbl for no apparent reason, you know that anyway, so that's how, you know, we just stood there, did ours, we direct Patrols.

During the day, a lot of times we were on combat patrols where we were armed with teeth and looking for someone to fight, we were on uh like our first Starlight Patrol Operation and uh or jumping around you know, and he steps on a landline and it was one of those that don't sound right now, you can hear, you can hear them click and there was actually anti, I guess it was anti-person, it could have been anti-tank. mine, but the bottom line is that he knew when he stepped on it, what was going to happen next and a lot of them have a timer so they explode a few seconds later, like a grenade, you can pull the pin and fly with the spoon and supposedly it had about four seconds until it actually exploded there's a delayed fuse on them and that's what this mine was like and he told us all to back up and go down and we did and we basically saved our lives but we just blew it up.

Hell, you know it was Vietnam in many ways, it was a series of my friend's death, but when that happened I was a green, you know, you know, Young didn't know about China and, uh, when that happened, something snapped at me and I turned. He had this thought inside me. He was going to kill all the little children he could. You know, and that's pretty much what I did. The rest of my two are there, so shoot it was. For me at the time it was more rewarding because I had more opportunities to kill the

enemy

and I thought that the more I killed, the less chance they had to kill my friends, you know, sorry, we had a couple of them.

I would say not. I don't know typical but they were missions that we were on that I was on go out and match you know you're never alone on a track or whatever I don't care if you're in the lead you know you take your friend with you you know he literally looks at you the butt, I'm sorry, but I don't know if this is edited or not, but hey, you know, you never went anywhere without a friend, you know, never and there's a good reason. for that, you know, especially if you're in a jungle environment like we were in, the enemy looks for any opportunity to kill you, you know, so we would go out like on a mission that he sent us, uh, where this guy. he shows up on a soapbox in the afternoon around three o'clock or whatever and gets up on his little soapbox preaching his communist nonsense to the townspeople and our job was to get his ass off and we would do it.

We didn't set up on the hill, you know, early in the morning, before the sun came up, and we took a fire team to protect our rear and he and I took turns using the binoculars because after a while it was really powerful . Binoculars are great for seeing, but after a while your eyeballs are ready to fall out, you have to take a break, so as the day goes on, you know, we keep adjusting our guns for the wind and you know, the light of the sun and all those things affect. the bullet hit, so we would keep our Del, we call it our dope on your rifle, you know, it's the windage and the elevation that you put on it to make the shot land where you wanted it to, so we would do it all day.

It was a long time before this guy came out and whoever was with his rifle at the time would shoot and, you know, he'd be on the ground before the sound came, you know, so that was kind of a mission we had. others were like OverWatch, sorry, Dicky Chappelle, who was he? Do you know who he is? Nikki Chappelle was a reporter that he landed with the Marines when they landed on Iwo Jima and, uh, war correspondent and what an incredible woman, just as tough as the man from Nails. around the fire at night she would tell these stories, man, it was like her language was worse than the marines and I didn't think that was possible, but it was like she was a man on a trip.

I love that guy and she was with Us for about a week and we were on this operation and someone in front of her set off a trip wire and this pineapple grenade, they call them pineapples, they were from World War II and they have big chunks on the sides. , that's what I call them. pineapple because they look like one anyway they tripped, this wireless thing went off and a piece of the store didn't, uh, cut his throat and he died right there, in the nice burgers in Vietnam, sorry for the language, but a lot of things happened So.

You know she was miserable. You know, ultimately, it was hell. We were at our base camp in July early in the morning, around seven o'clock, we got up grabbing Chow whatever and uh wandering around and we got this call that uh. The helicopter has been shot down and not far from our position. You know, a few clicks and we have to leave. We're going to go out and protect this helicopter because there were other Marines on board about a squad size, I guess. whatever, they bring in several helicopters and they fly our company there, which you know is our company, and when we start to land, we can't land because we're taking enemy fire and they just flew away and we jumped.

We walked out the door into some rice fields and you know, there we were in the middle of all this mess and we didn't know this at the time and I don't know how to tell it in terms of story except that, uh, we stumbled upon a VC headquarters, They were starting to build up, they had a couple of battalions, as I understand it, of battalions there that were going to build up and assault us in July and they overran us well when we went out to protect this. At Chopper we set up a perimeter around it and the rice paddies that were in that area were uneven, they were like, you know, staggered.

I'm sure you've seen pictures of them, but you have a berm on one of them that keeps the water from there running to the next one, you know, that's how they split up and we ended up at this one that was in a low area where it was this Chopper and where the Marines were, what was left of them, that's where we. We ended up so we called in airstrikes all day long we called in naval fires against artillery, everything we could think of to hit these guys and they were still, you know, we were in a storm, there's no other way to put it, man.

They used that to point guns at us, they had .50 calibers, they had everything you could imagine and we were severely outnumbered, we didn't know it at the time, we just knew we were in the middle of a terrible fight and so we kept going. shoot and my rifle had an M1 Garand was my sniper rifle and I only had a limited amount of ammo, everyone else was carrying m14 at the time which were 7.60 millimeter rounds and we had,you know, they had enough of that in the hour and that early in the morning, but I ran out, I ran out of ammo pretty quickly and uh, one of my friends got hit pretty bad, three got hit here in the shoulder and on both shoulders, and another one here and I hit.

I got his butt off the line and we put him back on there. We had a small CP, which is the command post, it is the center of the perimeter that we have. That is where the captain and everyone you know were hanging the radio men and all that is there and the fighters all of us are in the line and they took him out and I gave him my rifle because I have ammo anyway and I took his and uh so at least I had something to fight with and we spent the whole day doing that and taking incoming fire and they killed us and then they physically assaulted us and then they threw mortar at us and physically assaulted us and this continued all day and into the night and I don't know, it must have been around one and two in the morning.

He was laying down like that, just laying down, grabbing it and trying to grab something. Z and my friends watching, he's like maybe from here to that flowerpot and you hear that you hear that thing that's like a mortar round when they're fired they make this sound and it's like they light up, they have a propelled rocket and it goes up a lot here and They go back down, well you have about I don't know how many, probably eight seconds or less, but from the moment you hear that to the moment you come back exploding, so I heard that and I knew they were at it again, so I grabbed my rifle and walked over to crouch and as I did, the bullet hit my friend's position, um and uh, I got hit in the right elbow by shrapnel and I didn't know it at the time either, I didn't realize it at all. that moment that the concussion had lifted me up and launched me forward and all I can, all I know is that I was buried, I didn't.

I didn't know if he was alive I didn't know if he was dead I couldn't hear anything I couldn't see anything I couldn't feel anything I was from the concussion and that thing just numbed all my senses and I thought you know, I didn't know, I really thought I was dead. for a second, you know, I thought maybe he was dead, you know, I don't know, so I just stood there, but something in my brain or wherever kicked in and said, you know. The next thing that's going to happen here they're going to figure this out, so I knew I had to get up and get ready for that, you know, so I did.

I got up enough to run, shook my hair, whatever I did to get it done. I went back into a defensive position, you know, because I knew they were coming at us and it was one of those nights where there wasn't really any moonlight but there was enough starlight and you know there's no city lights or anything out there. , but there's enough light, you know from the beginning or whatever, so that you can see silhouettes and things in front of you, especially if it's moving and uh, here they come, you know, they crawl and sniff, sniff on the ground and probably was in my last magazine or less of a magazine of rounds left and um, I told my friend or I thought it was him.

I didn't know what was there and I didn't know anything at the time and I said, hey, you know, wait until you get closer, you know, because we only had a limited amount to make sure they counted, so I waited until it went from me to you and then I opened the ones I could see and thought we were done. I know I thought, okay, I'm going to see God next, you know, or the devil, whatever, but I thought no, I'm dead and I had already fixed the bayonets because I knew we were going to hand over - hand combat because no we had enough rounds left to stop another attack like the one we had been enduring all day and um it just stopped there was no more sound there was no more fire there was no more nothing it just stopped and I was like oh maybe I'm dead you know , it's like you were, so you know, my head is so up at the time that I didn't know and uh, so I waited and waited and waited for nothing, you know and finally you could hear the guys behind.

I roll around, you know, and the guys call the doctors and all that and, uh, but he's on my other side, I said, man, I said I couldn't understand why my sleeve, almost utility shirt, was wet and , man, you know, I've done it. I haven't been drinking water, you know, and it turns out it was my blood, but they called him Corman and he wrapped the thing up, took me off the line and put me back in the CP and that was the end, it was them. They called the helicopters the next morning to cut us off and evacuate us and before they got there you know you look up to see you know they're going to shoot him or whatever and nothing he doesn't come in so you know you go back braver, you stand up. a little bit finally I got up and we all did and I walked to where my position was and I had lost my helmet and I found my helmet and I knew it was mine because it had his name on it, you know, we named it after him. there all your gears had your name on them and I found it in the back, we had these old steel pots they called them that from World War II and the back of that thing collapsed from the concussion of that round, ya you know, and I was looking for my friend, uh, and we found part of one of his boots, it was all his stuff to help and, for many years, I carried that with part of him inside me and I thought you know it was just that .

It's really a fucked up way to live your life, you know, it sucks. I endured it, I have no idea how, except that a lot of people who loved me and cared about me and helped me get through it, you know, and here I am today crying about it. you know, at that point I had given up hope that I would ever see my homeland again, it just didn't seem possible um, you know, it was still, the enemy was still out there just because they wounded me. They evacuated me to the hospital ship Repose and I was on board for a few weeks, in fact they went to the Philippines to refuel and the damn thing broke down so we were there for about two weeks, we're only supposed to be there today anyway um I just didn't think I didn't think after that I thought well I still have to go back to the combat zone we could get killed uh you know who knows you know what can happen I just know that I just didn't think I was going to come back but I just gave up.

I think we did well. We took a helicopter from July to Da Nang, it was about 50 miles north of us and from Danang we got on the C-130 and left Lewis for Okinawa and from Okinawa we flew on Japan Airlines. I think it was one of the Asian airlines and they flew us to Tokyo and then we swapped flight attendants and got American flight attendants. You know, they called them stewardesses in those days and we flew back to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro we were like American women, you know, I got scared, man. I thought yeah, we were in heaven, so we forgot about all our problems, you know, for the moment, but we landed in El Toro, they checked our travel bags, they gave us a bunch of injections, and before the sun that morning, I was at LAX, about 10 of us got in this big old Cadillac or whatever, it was a taxi and we split the fare and We got to LAX and we were all dressed in cylinder green, our dress uniform and a car took off and every single one of us, man, we hit the ground laying there in a fucking ditch LAX and then you get up and you look around and you know that and that's That's how, you know, I got some bullshit from some people in my way to my flight, you know, and I did the smart thing not to involve them since it shot up the difference between the Vietnam era veteran and one of the greats. and in World War II, they all did the same thing combat-wise and they all had the same mentality, I think, but the difference is that when they came back, they came back on ships that had about a month or three weeks or whatever they came back from Germany or whatever theater they were in, they were with their friends and the guys that they went and fought with and they had the opportunity to report and talk about their experiences and move through some of that stuff with people who really understood what The hell had happened in Vietnam it wasn't like they came back alone, you know, along with a bunch of other guys I didn't know, you know, they were just rotating back at the time.

At that time, from various places, some of them were in Saigon, they were all over Vietnam, they had hundreds of thousands of troops there at that time and, you know, I came back, you know, with no one to talk to or share about it and Nobody in the states understood it, they just didn't understand what it was like to kill people, it's not a good thing. I think being a sniper was probably what I was most proud of, I saved a lot of lives and kept a lot of my friends alive. I didn't save them all and I struggled with that for many years. um, I just had to at some point acknowledge the fact that you can't save them all.

It's not possible for just one guy to do that. Do you know Bowser? I hated to admit it. And I still hate it, but it's a fact.